Chapter Nine

A traiteur, packing up the last late order of sweetmeats to please the guests at a high house’s card table, had seen a horse and rider on the rue du Four, galloping at speed, the rider’s hat pulled down over his face, his black hair streaming behind him like night clouds. The traiteur viewed him as a kind of apparition, a gust of wind that had slipped by and nearly knocked his tray out of his hands as he went to load it onto his push-cart, tangible only by the foul-smelling mud the horse’s hooves kicked up and the way the rain parted around him, like a shower of glass beads. His coat was the colourless shade of wet cloth, the traiteur admitted, but he was riding fast through the night street, like a man pursued.

That, so far, was the Baron de Cardonnoy’s murderer – a phantom whose face was obscured by the night and the rain, his hair and his horse’s flanks turned dark by water, the blood on his clothes soaking down to his skin as the winter rain did its best to wash him clean. He seemed, to Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, a symbol for everything that was wrong in Paris – faceless, cowardly, a creature moved by such unknowable appetites that it was impossible to count him as a human.

When he was a child, La Reynie had seen the monsters from his nurse’s ghost stories in his dreams, until she’d stopped telling them entirely, making vague references to his cowardice when she tucked him into bed. He’d long since ceased to fear the shadows, putting his faith in God, whose approving eye lit the street lamps at night and saw each husband home with his wife and children, each sparrow bedded down in its nest, the king himself in his palace surrounded by a blaze of candles. God’s strong hand made the earth turn in order, and men’s faith allowed the full completion of their creator’s intention.

But the city denied him. La Reynie’s coach jostled on the cobblestone streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. When had that faith been shaken?

He had questioned the Duchesse de Bouillon at the Châtelet after her arrest, with a jeering crowd outside the gates. The husband she had attempted to poison stood at her right hand, her lover at her left. Together they made a mockery of the law, and still the crowd cheered the trio as they came and departed.

After the questioning La Reynie had ridden to Versailles and spent two hours closeted with the king, standing before him, the king’s hand even, once, reaching out to touch his shoulder, his raised arm wafting the scent of the king’s sweat to his nose. The king wore no perfume. The king had seemed to be enclosed in a halo – the lines on his face, the creases in his clothing, the yellow mark on a front tooth seemed, in the royal atmosphere, something more than human, merely the external trappings of a presence that obliterated with its divine force.

And yet, as the hours passed, La Reynie became almost ecstatic. The king, in his golden halo, talked of poison, of assassination attempts, of the unnatural relations between men that flourished in the back staircases and the stables and salons of his court. More than the illicit gambling or the vast sums expended on dress, the city of Paris, the court at Versailles like a vast, swollen head feeding on its own body, or the impoverished countryside, the king was afraid of this corruption of nature. And it was he, La Reynie, who would see it all and root it out.

La Reynie had entered the palace at Versailles with awe at the gold, the carvings, the vastness of the structure itself, which towered more like a cliff dropping off into the sea than like a building made by men – all this opulence and, beneath it, the secret dealings in poison, in witchcraft, the men and women who had summoned devils, who had given in to pleasures that no one should name. The ladies of the court went to La Chapelle and La Voisin for their abortions, and La Reynie thought that he could see the sin on them, in their powdered faces and in the lovely dresses that bared too much of their throats. The Minister of Finance’s son had been accused of attacking a young man who refused his advances with a sword. The king’s own brother was known to pick his favourites among the gentlemen of the court, and these men, too, came and went in the same rooms as the king. It was as if he had bitten into a red, ripe apple and found it teeming with worms.

The city was not whole.

In the breast pocket of his coat he carried a letter from the Minister of War, Louvois, talking of demonic rites and treason against the king. Where had this darkness come from? In his city, on the streets over which he had jurisdiction? When he ate, now, La Reynie thought of poison, and of spells that robbed their victims of strength. When he questioned his prisoners, their confessions were written on loose sheets, not in the record books of the Grand Châtelet. So that the pages could be removed from the record more easily, if they accused anyone too near the king.

But it was La Reynie they said looked like the devil.

It had rained again, early in the morning, and his coach, bound for the Châtelet, seemed to be travelling in its own envelope of foul smell that bubbled its way out of the winter mud. He wished for cold weather again, to freeze it over.

The Châtelet, when he reached it, loomed over the carriage, its towers like a series of squat thumbs pointing up towards the sky. The air in the street smelled like blood from the butchers’ stalls at Les Halles, which lay just to the north of the fortress. The river, too, wafted its stink up to surround the towers, and a solitary swan – the muddy remnant of a flock that the king had imported to beautify the river – had wandered up from the quay and was picking at bits of bruised cabbage with its snake’s neck.

Louis Bazin de Bezons was already waiting for him inside the Châtelet, his body slouched heavily against one of the Châtelet’s cold-breathing stone walls. Bezons was the commissioner of the Chambre Ardente, the council that had been summoned to review accusations of poisoning. He moved ponderously, his weight falling into each footstep as if he carried justice like a heavy load around his neck. When he spoke, too, it was often after a long pause, which might make his interlocutor feel that he was not being listened to at all.

‘Shall we be requesting a warrant for the arrest of Madame de Cardonnoy?’ Bezons asked when La Reynie entered.

La Reynie shook his head. He was already starting up the hallway, towards the cells and the interrogation room. He hated to be still when there was work at hand. Behind him, Bezons sighed and hurried to match La Reynie’s stride.

‘But what about the painter? Wasn’t the baronne putting horns on her husband?’

La Reynie shook his head at the enclosing stone walls, although he wasn’t sure if Bezons could see him. The corridors of the Châtelet were dim, built for defence of the river, and they exhaled cold air that seemed to seep up from deep in the earth. Their rafters skimmed low over La Reynie’s head, like the inside of a honeycomb. He found the closeness comforting. It gave him a sense of order.

‘The husband was wrong,’ he said. ‘The painter was courting her maid. The baronne knew nothing of it.’

‘And you believe her?’ Bezons’s shortness of breath gave his voice a laughing quality. ‘A lady’s maid will take on all kinds of sins for the sake of her mistress.’

‘She had tokens from him. A portrait he’d made of her. It could have been intended for no one else.’ There had been just a moment when he had believed the valet’s testimony, and his rage that the baronne had lied to him so brazenly and with such sincerity had almost overwhelmed him. La Reynie felt guilty for that now. He had been so quick to credit a servant’s word.

‘Hmph.’ Bezons took a few jogging steps to catch up him. ‘It would be best if we could solve this quickly. It’s the talk of every salon. In a week or two they’re going to start claiming that we murdered the man.’

‘It wasn’t the painter,’ he said again.

The failure of his own police work secretly pleased him. In the sordid dealings of poison and enchantment that had become his daily life, he had been relieved to find Madame de Cardonnoy as she seemed to be: proud but honest, clear-eyed, mourning a husband to whom she had performed her duties, even if they were not reciprocated with his love. In her drawing room, proud and incorruptible, she had reminded him very faintly of his own wife, who had died thirty years before and had faded in his memory so that now only her tender outline remained. Should there not still be some such women in Paris?

He passed his hand over his face as he and Bezons approached the cell that was their destination. Sometimes thought came to him in such rapid streams that he needed the physical movement of his hands to dispel it. He had outpaced Bezons. The commissioner of the Chambre Ardente caught him up, panting.

Two of the prison guards approached from the other end of the corridor. Between them shuffled a figure whose limbs were wasted like knotted rope. He walked bent over, like an old man perhaps, although to La Reynie’s eyes the movement was more like that of a monkey, a swinging, cringing gait. But when he raised his head and looked at La Reynie, his green eyes, which had once bewitched noblemen and criminals alike, priests and witches, men and women, still had a haunted force behind them. He was losing his hair in handfuls.

From another chamber, a woman’s voice cried out. Bezons wrinkled his nose.

‘Do you know who that is?’

When the magician Lesage laughed, it was a raw laugh.

‘I think you’re torturing my lover, that old bitch. I hear she’s sentenced to die.’

‘So she is.’ La Reynie did not ask how Lesage had heard this news. The prisoners were housed three to a cell, and guards talked, prisoners talked – sometimes they shouted to each other down hallways and turned the fortress into a reverberating hive of angry voices. The Minister of War had written to him, too, suggesting that someone was carrying messages in from outside the prison. And yet as easy as it was to explain Lesage’s knowledge, the certainty with which he said the words made La Reynie shiver.

This wasted man had once claimed to have, at his beck and call, an army of spirits who did his bidding, unseen angels who whispered secrets in his ear, delivered letters with his clients’ innermost wishes written in their own hands, guided him to where treasure was buried in the ground and communicated with Satan himself. He had done spells by passing a pigeon’s bloody heart under the chalice during Mass, and by desecrating human bones.

He and his lover, the crone La Voisin, had been king and queen of the underworld.

Bezons unlocked the door of the interrogation room and the guards entered first, with Lesage. A clerk came with a lamp to supplement the light of the narrow window. La Reynie waited in the doorway until Bezons and the prisoner were seated. He did not like to turn his back on the sorcerer, although after his outburst about La Voisin, Lesage seemed to have grown contrite and now sat with his hands folded meekly in front of him.

The clerk sat down on his stool. He had the ledger of the case before him, but he wrote the date on a loose sheet of paper inserted into the book, rather than on the bound pages.

Bezons took a chair behind the bureau near the window. La Reynie preferred to stand, as it gave him freedom to walk back and forth across the room while he thought. He could feel the commissioner’s irritated glance following him, wishing that he would be still. But La Reynie hated hearing the sounds of torture, however well deserved. He needed the freedom to turn his back to Lesage, so that the sorcerer wouldn’t see the discomfort written on his face when La Voisin’s screams came through the wall.

‘Shall we resume with the case of the Maréchal de Luxembourg?’

‘Wait a moment,’ La Reynie said. ‘Lesage. Did you ever meet the Baron de Cardonnoy?’

The magician looked up at him, his eyes clear and confident. He didn’t seem to find the question surprising. La Reynie saw the baronne in his mind’s eye. I am afraid of what I might discover about my own husband if I look at him too closely, she had said.

‘I never met him,’ Lesage said. But just as La Reynie was letting out the breath he’d been holding, Lesage leaned forward, with an expression almost of pleasure. ‘But I … heard of him.’

‘What did you hear?’

Lesage shook his head sadly. ‘Isn’t this baron a small fish, Monsieur? I thought you intended to catch a general.’

The Maréchal de Luxembourg had once been a celebrated general and now occupied a prison cell at Vincennes.

‘What did you know of the baron?’

Lesage was tapping one finger against the knuckles of the other hand, a disconcerting, noiseless rhythm.

‘Let me think. Cardonnoy, Cardonnoy, a little baron – you know he wouldn’t have been one of my greatest customers, when I served such illustrious people, but I do know his name. Of course! Was he not a member of Madame de Fontet’s salon? I did the paper trick for him, one night.’

This was a trick Lesage had explained in detail. A curious patron wrote a letter addressed to Lesage’s attendant spirits, enumerating the wishes that he or she desired to be granted. The letter was then crumpled and coated in wax, for which Lesage substituted, through prestidigitation, a similar wax ball, this one filled with gunpowder, which he threw into a fire and made explode. Later he read the requests and returned them to their authors, saying that the spirits had received the message they had believed destroyed.

‘I thought you said you hadn’t met Monsieur de Cardonnoy?’

‘Oh no, Monsieur,’ said Lesage, with a smug smile. ‘I’ve met everyone.’

‘What did he write, in his letter to the spirits?’ La Reynie asked. The lamp’s wick hadn’t been trimmed properly and it was guttering and smoking, casting unsettling shadows across the strip of daylight that lanced in through the narrow window. He took a deep breath. Lesage was lying. ‘God damn you, I know you never met him,’ La Reynie said. ‘His wife was a member of Madame de Fontet’s salon, not him.’

‘I didn’t say I knew him well,’ Lesage replied, unwinding from his slouch until he was looking La Reynie straight in the eye. ‘But I met him. Once. He’s a little lord, like many others, I didn’t pay him close attention. I need a moment to remember.’

‘What was in the letter?’ said Reynie.

A scream echoed down the hall. The torturers were applying their art once more. La Voisin wailed, without words. The torturers would be tightening the brodequins around her legs until her flesh was crushed, to see if her testimony withstood the trial of pain. Lesage seemed to perk up and lean towards the sound of her cries, like a dog scenting a rat.

‘You didn’t want to witness her last confession for yourself, Monsieur?’ he asked.

La Reynie said nothing.

‘She’s the worst of them, you know,’ Lesage continued, after a pause. ‘A wicked, wicked woman. It’s lucky that so many of the court trusted me, that they came to me instead of her, because she would have sold them true poison to solve their troubles, and I only sold them a few child’s tricks with balled-up papers and talk of spirits, and so lulled them quite innocently into believing that all of their worst wishes would be granted. The king himself has me to thank for that – that I only did a little false magic, and never turned to poison.’

‘What do you know of the Baron de Cardonnoy?’ La Reynie asked. The more Lesage put him off and misdirected him, the more certain he became that the magician did know something, that what he had thought was a wild guess was really a stroke of luck. It was Lesage’s habit to delay like this, to drag his feet and insist he had forgotten the details, when he was on the verge of some explosive revelation.

Lesage closed his eyes. ‘The Baron de Cardonnoy was unhappy with his choice of wife. You know, the husband’s often unhappy when his wife goes about in society without him. It gives her too many opportunities to sin. Cardonnoy, Cardonnoy – I remember! La Bosse or La Chapelle had an agent in that house, a little servant who sent news back from the salons so that they could fake their fortunes better. That’s why I think I know so much about this baron, though we only met the once. He wouldn’t pay me, you see. I promised him all his heart’s desires would be fulfilled, if he would only give me two thousand livres, but the man thought that was too high a price for happiness.’

La Reynie tapped his foot. There was no point in reminding Lesage that he’d just claimed his spells were all fakery and could fulfil no one’s desires. ‘Who was the spy in Hôtel Cardonnoy?’

Lesage shook his head, as if his ears were ringing.

‘How could I remember? La Bosse and La Voisin and La Chapelle shared their little spider’s web. Their servants were in every noble house – why should I remember the names of such people? They all hated each other in secret.’

La Voisin’s screams were increasing in volume, and La Reynie, who had been shamefully ill the last time he had watched the brodequins applied, began to fear that her cries would discomfit him more than they did Lesage.

‘Who was the spy? Was it the man’s valet? Did he visit fortune-tellers?’ No wonder the baron’s valet had wanted to cast suspicion on his mistress, if he had any connection with La Voisin.

‘You’ll have to ask La Bosse about that. Or maybe her in the next room,’ Lesage said, jerking his head towards the sound of La Voisin’s torture with an indecent grin.

‘La Bosse is dead, so we can hardly question her,’ La Reynie said. La Bosse had been one of the first women the police had arrested, after she had bragged to a dinner guest about her skill with poisons. She had been executed almost a year earlier.

‘Then perhaps you must ask La Chapelle.’

‘Why would she have a spy there?’

It was clear Lesage didn’t remember the name of La Bosse’s go-between or had exaggerated something that he knew only from hearsay. But still La Reynie hoped he might squeeze something useful out of him.

‘This baron was ambitious,’ Lesage said. ‘He visited fortune- tellers, he wanted all the news from Versailles, who to support and who to importune for favours, and who might be about to fall out of favour. He was a rich man, wasn’t he, not some little backwater baron after all, and every man like that hopes he’ll make his name at court and die a marquis. I remember there was some Breton priest who mentioned his name more than once, a friend of La Voisin and La Grange. I can’t remember his name, but I know the Breton used to send his mistress to La Chapelle for abortions, poor woman.’

Bezons, seated behind the bureau, brought his hand down on the table. ‘God damn you, can’t you do better than some Breton? Give us a name!’

Lesage nodded, and went on nodding long after the gesture had become meaningless. He rubbed his hands together to warm them. He seemed to be savouring La Reynie’s frustration.

‘Oh, I couldn’t say,’ said Lesage. ‘You understand, I am not like these people. I’m just a charlatan. I did a public service, because all of these corrupt lords and ladies, they wanted poisons, black magic, the desecration of the host – there was truly nothing they thought too evil to do, once it was offered to them, and La Voisin and those others, they would do it all. La Bosse once had a client take a heart impaled with iron nails into a church, to bring about the death of the man he thought had cheated him. I was always the lesser sin, Monsieur. When people came to me for divine help, I cheated them, yes, but I didn’t damn them. No, I saved many from the likes of La Bosse.’

‘Tell us something useful, Lesage,’ said La Reynie. ‘This is all hearsay, and I have to solve a murder.’

‘A murder?’ Lesage leaned forward. ‘This baron’s the suspect? No, no, he’s dead. Of course.’ Lesage’s ability to read the small changes in the air of a room made it seem as if he really was attended by spirits. ‘I’d look at this baron’s wife, who goes visiting without her husband. There are many unhappy wives in Paris. They’ll bring the whole city down.’

‘Is that all you have?’ La Reynie snapped. ‘He visited fortune-tellers, his wife was unhappy? You don’t remember anything.’

‘I do!’ Lesage gasped, bent forward at the waist, wrung his hands. The ropy sinews of his neck stood out through the collar of his shirt. La Reynie noticed again how inhuman he looked, how monkeyish. ‘I have – I have knowledge such as would make your hair stand on end, Messieurs. You must hear me out. You must.’

And in fact the desperate conviction with which Lesage spoke did make the hairs on the back of La Reynie’s neck prickle into gooseflesh. He could see the look of unease that passed over Bezons’s face and then resolved itself into a stony scowl.

‘That Breton priest, he lived near Les Invalides. He was the same one who used to travel to sell love potions to Madame de Montespan and her ladies. Cardonnoy was another of his clients – I heard a little of their dealings.’

La Reynie had noticed that Lesage often brought up the king’s mistress’s name when he was becoming frightened, as if it were a kind of protective spell in itself. All of his testimony circled around that woman. He feared to give a clear account of her and yet he couldn’t stop repeating her name. Still, there were proofs of Lesage’s sincerity, although in his testimony he rambled and stammered and contradicted himself. The magician had been arrested once before, twelve years ago, at which trial he had been condemned for blasphemy and sentenced to life as an oarsman in the fleet of French galleys that plied the Mediterranean, skirmishing with the Spanish, the Turks, the Venetians and the Genovese. Men did not return from that sentence. They died, or they eked out their lives chained to the oars. And yet, five years later, Lesage had reappeared in Paris, still green-eyed, his beard a little wild, walking stooped and hungry, but plying his sleight-of-hand tricks once again.

Some power, human or inhuman, had freed him.

Lesage had not named his benefactor at court, if he had ever had one. But the records of his first arrest included the claim – unsubstantiated – that one of the clients who had purchased his frog oils and love spells had been Madame de Montespan, in the days before she became the king’s mistress.

And if Lesage had sold her love potions, and she had used those potions on the king? La Reynie was not sure that he believed it. But he knew there were others who did. Lesage was cautious about what he claimed against her, but La Reynie had heard it said that she had paid for black Masses where infants were sacrificed in order to convince the devil to grant her wishes, and that there was a network of fallen priests in Paris willing to perform such requests.

With or without the aid of magic, Madame de Montespan certainly had the influence required to save her former magician from the galleys. But if she had done so, then it must be supposed that Lesage’s influence reached as far as Louis himself, and that the king was caught in a magic web that tied him to a woman who had pledged herself to the devil. No one must ever hear that the king’s mistress had trafficked in black magic. Lesage himself, for all the force and conviction with which he testified against his former colleagues, the other sorcerers and poisoners and witches, was tongue-tied on the subject. But when pressed, he admitted that he knew things he was afraid to say. He knew terrible things.

‘You must listen to me, I’ve hardly told you anything yet,’ Lesage whispered.

The magician’s mind was like a sucking wave, pulling him under and into a world of salt water and whispers. Lesage was hungry. Ever since he had returned to Paris he’d found he could barely tolerate hunger, although it had been as constant as the ocean on board the galleys and in the off-season when the convicts and enslaved Turks performed forced labour in the seaside towns. Every meal set in front of him he ate as if someone might steal it, or the angry comite who oversaw the prisoners might knock it out of his hand as punishment for laziness. In the salons where he performed his magic he often inadvertently found himself staring past the fascinated faces of his audience and towards the invisible aura of whatever tray of delicacies the servants were carrying – the fruit pies, the islands of meringue floating in custard. The high ladies fainted for fresh peas and truffles boiled in champagne, but Lesage would have eaten anything sweet, although his teeth were weak. In the prison he ate his ration of beans and then curled around the hole in his stomach, the empty sack from which stories emerged.

‘I think it must have been about two years ago that I met this baron,’ he said. ‘He was a courtier at Versailles? Yes, it would have been about the time that La Voisin and La Chapelle went to Saint-Germain to perform auguries for – what was her name? De Montespan’s lady’s maid. Around the time that the king began to be interested in Mademoiselle de Fontanges. I heard that Madame de Montespan threw tantrums at the thought that she might be replaced by another woman, and one so much younger. I doubt she shed a tear when Mademoiselle de Fontanges died, and so slowly, so that she’d lost all her beauty by the end.’

Flap, flap, flap, went the empty sack where his hunger was. He watched La Reynie’s reaction as he mentioned the king’s mistress. The man wanted de Montespan jailed, but was too cowardly to bring his accusations to the king, and usually the mention of her name distracted him so much that he lost his train of thought. Now La Reynie said, merely, ‘And the Baron de Cardonnoy?’

So he must want this murderer badly. The lieutenant general’s fear gave him away. Some men frequented fortune-tellers because they wanted to hear that they were strong and all would be well. Some came because they wanted to hear that what they feared was true.

‘Even I couldn’t say everything that goes on at court,’ Lesage said. ‘But this Breton priest – I’m sorry, I can’t give you the details, I never wanted to know the man. I’ve been burned by such people before. As for the spy in Monsieur de Cardonnoy’s house, you’ll want someone who could read and write. Like the servant of the maréchal who signed his master’s name to the devil’s paperwork. La Voisin would know who it was, I’m sure. It’s a pity her execution is so near. If you’d let me confront her again, I’d have it out of her in a moment, that liar. It’s been a moment since she’s screamed now, hasn’t it? They must be giving her a rest, with her confessor.’

Lesage could have licked his lips, to see the way La Reynie flinched. The hypocrite was afraid of his own torturers.

He would have said anything. He had told so many lies, and now La Reynie had given him a new name, Cardonnoy, and just enough thread to spin out a web of story. The man didn’t share the same circles as his wife, and so his marriage was unhappy. He’d heard his name on the lips of fortune-tellers, and so he was a schemer at Versailles. There had been a spy in his house – that much he was sure of. The rest of the story would come. La Reynie believed him best when he had to drag every word out of him, and he needed La Reynie’s belief.

At night in his cell Lesage sometimes felt the earth tilt underneath him, as if he were still on the slave galley. Then he would feel the stagnant summer air of a becalmed ocean or the unending drip and seep of rain beneath the tent pitched over the oars, where the oarsmen slept in their chains, packed in like fish in a net, his scrawny, flea-bitten back touching his neighbour’s bony knees, cold biting through his clothes. The Huguenots murmured prayers of patience to their god and the Turks prayed in their own language, almost silently, spinning out their laments in a voice low enough that the drowsy guards wouldn’t hear and give them a kick. Others drank deep of the comite’s sour, watered wine and then fouled themselves in their sleep. He had been one of them, often enough, trading his handful of bread for wine and then dragging himself to the railing in the night to vomit. So quickly they had reduced him to a little candle flame of intellect burning at the back of his neck, its only goal to keep the scraps of his flesh together, to go on breathing, to escape from pain.

Once upon a time he had been a man who had ambitions other than to continue living.

By daylight, the flies landed on his eyelids and drank his sweat as he pulled with both hands on the oar, the ache of the work travelling all the way up his spine.

His mind was a wave. It kept taking him back to the boat. From the benches, the oars were the haphazard pikes of an advancing army, rising and then falling to cut the water. One felt the resistance of the waves against the oar’s blade, the blistering twist against calloused hands when the oar pulled free, raining down salt droplets. They drank the sweat that rolled down their lips.

The Turks called to each other in their own language, back and forth across the aisle of the coursier. All of the officers believed that the Turks were the strongest oarsmen, better than the Huguenots and the criminals, taller and, besides, more resigned to having been kidnapped and brought to a bad life in a country far from their own. They spoke pidgin French and abstained from the comite’s wine. At night on the water, each oarsman bedded down chest-to-knees, the deck too cramped to lie flat. The officers slept on trestles laid over the forest of chained bodies. How many days Lesage had woken up that way, parched, starving, the knobs of his spine digging a groove against the bench, his head fallen slack against the bearded head of a Turk, a Huguenot, some desperate man who, for his religion, had been stripped of all but the barest threads of his life.

He, Lesage, had stripped religion from itself. He had profaned the host. He had performed miracles and petty, childish tricks. He had been a magician who commanded an army of spirits, like Solomon, and now he was hungry and his back was burned from the sun. He held a crust of bread under his shirt. He ate it, mouthful by mouthful, throughout the day, rolling each bite around his tongue until it softened with spit and became porridge. He was trying to make it last and, besides, his teeth hurt when he chewed. He was trying to perform a miracle and turn one loaf into a thousand loaves. The chains that locked him to his oar had worn blisters into his skin and proved the worthlessness of all of his miracles.

When they set him free, he had returned to Paris. He’d remembered La Voisin a thousand times on the water, and then, when he’d grown too hungry, forgotten her entirely. He’d left the boat and bundled up his oarsman’s cloak and gone back to Paris, and stood at her doorstep, and eaten turnip soup and mutton at her table, and felt a new kind of rage rising in his throat along with the old lust and the old resentment. So the witch’s husband beat her. Should he give a fuck? She still drank her fill of wine, slept in a warm bed, earned enough coins with her spells and poisons to buy bread. She was nothing to him. Inside his stomach there was an ocean with a beetle-oared ship crawling across it, slowly, staffed by groans, never advancing.

I’m hungry, the ocean said. The rest of you can get fucked.

‘Was there anyone in Paris who might have held something against the Baron de Cardonnoy?’ Lieutenant General La Reynie asked.

And the ocean said, Throw them all in. La-Voison-La-Filastre-LaChapelle-Soissons-Luxembourg-Montespan-Jesus-The-Pope-The-King. I will tell you a story that never ends, I will feed you a mountain of bodies, but I will not go back to the oar.

And the magician Lesage said, ‘Oh yes, he had enemies. That renegade priest, I heard he passed a consecrated wafer with the baron’s name written on it under the communion chalice during Masses for a month, to bring about the downfall of a rival. Now I can barely remember if the matter was love or business, but – yes, both, perhaps, because didn’t he court the same woman for his mistress as the Marquis de Feuquières? I heard he visited La Chapelle, and she gave him a jar with the blood of pigeon in it, and told him to piss in it and then hide it in the lady’s carriage, to ensure that she’d be able to think of nothing but him. Perhaps his wife heard that story, too.’

‘Which priest was it?’

‘Mariette. Or – what was his name, Roberges? The one who always needed La Chapelle’s services.’

Lesage laughed. He could put names together all day. He knew the citizens of the underworld, who they’d kissed and who they’d stolen from. He would catch La Reynie in a net of a thousand names and it would not be enough to buy him his freedom, but it would purchase his life. Because they would not put him to death or to the oar until he had told them everything he knew, and the story of what he knew was never-ending.

‘Who was the spy that La Voisin and the fortune-tellers had in Hôtel Cardonnoy?’

‘I never met him, Monsieur, I don’t know his name. But it would have been some little thug, dressed up like a good servant. The valet, or the coachman, or the wife’s maid, someone close enough to the baron to know all of his affairs.’

Once he had prestidigitated secret messages, trafficked in communion wafers, sold love potions, provided maps to hidden treasures, been paid for each marriage he brought about. Once he had spoken to a marquis with such magic in his voice that the beguiled man had buried a purse of gold by the river, believing it would sprout like an onion and produce more little coins. And Lesage had found the place and harvested his own payment. It was easy, now, to see La Reynie working his way through his questions, trying not to lead Lesage too much by the nose, lest he invent more lies. He lied anyway. He told him things he only half remembered, things he’d forgotten, things that he knew quite well had never been true. Just tell me how the baron died, Monsieur de la Reynie, Lesage thought. I’ll help you even more if I know. And aren’t you being a little solicitous of this dead man’s wife?

The secretary took careful notes of all he said. The magic in his voice still worked, he knew. He saw Bezons shiver, and the lieutenant general tapped his desk with a close-pared fingernail, frowned, looked at the shadows on the ceiling, at the locked door, at Lesage’s hands as they twisted in front of him, but never at Lesage’s green eyes.

God save us, La Reynie thought, when he had finally exhausted his line of questioning. He barely knew more about the Baron de Cardonnoy than when he started, he had so much chaff to sift away from the truth.

Facing the magician Lesage in close quarters filled him with black exhaustion, as if he had spent the hours of questioning wrestling a shadow summoned from the abyss of the magician’s conscience. The man was half mad. He confused dates and names, stumbled, corrected himself, until his explanations criss-crossed like the ugly reverse of a tapestry. But for all the faults in his testimony, the stories he told rang true. There had been poison, black magic, renegade priests, and all playing right at the feet of the king, ignored.

On La Reynie’s desk were papers that needed attending to. It was the whole mundane business of Paris, whose care he had been charged with: the cleaning of her streets, the upkeep of her buildings, the price of her bread, her street lights, her granaries, her tradesmen, her rich, her poor, her criminals. He began the mental work of composing himself, tapping his pen against the pigeonhole drawers of his desk as he let the day’s events fall into a shape that felt right. He had not got as much from Lesage as he had hoped. Perhaps La Voisin, having been questioned, at last, under torture, would name some new accomplice whose power at court had so far been a shield. When the secretary brought him the transcript of her confession he opened it immediately, hoping for a name, an accomplice, a thread on which he could pull to unravel the ghastly knot.

But the pages told him nothing new. It was the same story, the same names that he had already heard a thousand times.

He spread the papers out in front of him, trying to make notes, looking for some revealing turn of phrase he’d missed the first time he’d read them. Didn’t the torturers know their work? Hadn’t he heard her wailing?

But what could her screams mean, when she was already so accomplished in lies? His men had wasted their last chance to question her. Tomorrow she would be burned alive.

In her cell, Catherine La Voisin was singing. Her legs ached, but the wine the guards had brought with her last supper coursed through her body, turning the pain into a kind of pulsing drum. Her head spun. Her teeth were numb. Her voice was as raw as ever, and hoarse from crying during the torturers’ last interrogation, but she had drunk her final bottle and she wanted to sing:

Madame wants a fu—

A fuck – a forget-me-not flower

To hang above her bed

And dream of her lover’s bower.

If she had been able to stand, she would have gone to the door and bellowed the words into the hallway. As it was, between the verses she collapsed into giggles, snorting back her own tears, remembering that tomorrow she would die. The song quavered – she sucked in a hissing breath and went on:

Monsieur wants a cunt –

A cunt – a country estate

To profit from as he desires

And fill it with silver plate.

Down the hallway she heard another prisoner’s voice join in, booming through the chorus, as if they were in a drinking hall in Paris, or sitting around her own little table in her home, sharing a bottle, two bottles, three. Dance, dance the branle!

The voice of her invisible companion made her laugh. Oh my friend, she thought, you have done yourself in, like me. Once they might have sung like this in her home, arms slung over each other’s shoulders, while her daughter uncorked bottles of sour wine and her husband eyed her across the table. She would have drunk until she was gay enough to kick up her heels in the kitchen, to kiss her lover in front of the whole company, to pull up her skirt and show the street her bare arse.

It was true that she was afraid of the fire. Even after the torturers’ visit, she could not imagine the pain. But if she was sure of her fate on earth, she was not yet sure of the afterlife. She had poisoned some men, she had played some clever tricks with the scriptures, but what about them – the men and women who came to her, and then sat in confession on Sundays? Would they burn, too? The whole world?

She would laugh in the face of any who pretended to be righteous.

Madame has such a great cunt –

Such a great, such great control

Over her husband’s purse

She buys silk in bolts and rolls.

They sang together, still. La Voisin’s voice cracked. The guards, now, were coming down the row of cells and banging doors as they went. Dance, dance the branle! Her legs were ruined. She would never dance again. She heard her unseen friend fall silent and thanked him, just as silently, for keeping her company, for however short a time. She went on with the chorus, drunkenly, until the guards were outside her cell, banging on the door, calling, ‘Shut up, you old bag! Shouldn’t your thoughts be on repentance?’